CSET Project #: 2206
Project Funding: UAA and Alaska DHSS
Start Date: September 2022
End Date: July 2023
Budget: $207633
Nathan Belz
Vinod Vasudevan
The State of Alaska has a high percentage of low-volume roads and many rural communities that rely on less conventional and “non-traditional” forms of transportation from an engineering and planning perspective. Many of these communities do not have the personnel or systems to report to the standard motor vehicle crash database. However, injury information maintained by hospitals and acute care facilities has the potential to help fill these data gaps. In addition, the sparse transportation network and rural nature of Alaska presents inherent data size issues, making most statistical methods of analysis erroneous. To address these issues, this work will concentrate on nonstandard safety data such as injuries and crashes on off-highway vehicles, such as 4-wheelers and snow machines, as well as non-standard accident reporting such as hospital records as cataloged in the Alaska Trauma Registry (AKTR) and other relevant datasets. Our primary goals are to: 1) engage relevant parties needed to develop a systems-based approach and streamline the data linkage process; and 2) establish a framework and a baseline by creating a more robust and comprehensive set of transportation safety data.